| > No, I’ve stated a population trait. The population of professional athletes Ok... but we've now left the field of genetics. Professional athletes are determined by whether they get hired to play sports professionally, not by genetic birthright. > Not all tall people can be NBA stars but all NBA stars are tall. Again, unsure the relation to genetics here, but this also isn't true. Muggsy was a god and is 5'3". Curry is 6'3" which is definitely tall, but among NBA players, not that tall... but his skill level is far, far, far higher than his height would indicate. The statistical variation between height and skill, even in the highly-artificially-selected-for population of NBA players, doesn't correlate perfectly enough to derive a good predictor. You just can't say "the taller the player, the better the player." Not even on average! So, it's not useful information. AND! This doesn't even get into the sociological aspect of NBA - how many young Muggsys are out there not getting put in (or accepted) to basketball camps/programs because they're "too short?" How many 7 year old future Currys are too hungry to train? > You’ve been advocating strongly for your position so I’m not sure it makes sense to just discount the opposition as useless. I certainly don't intend to imply your position is useless, I'm trying to demonstrate that correlative "evidence" (i.e. that a certain population is better at xyz) is unable to overcome sociological noise, and therefore the information is useless. |
This is actually a common fallacy - height is a fantastic predictor of NBA skill, that's why something like 15% of everyone in the US over 7' tall will play in the NBA at some point in their life. But once you've limited the question to the set of people who play in the NBA, it won't be nearly as good of a predictor of skill - because you're measuring after a selection effect.